Trouble Teller
by Wolf-Shadow's-Ghost
Summary: Hawke shares an incriminating tale with Varric while she desperately tries to avoid Aveline's wrath.   One-shot. Rating is for swear words.


Trouble Teller

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><p>Hawke groaned low in her throat as the door to the Hanged Man swung open and a broad figure stepped through. Sinking low in her seat and bringing up her half empty pint of sour ale, she did her best to fall backward into the dank, dirty shadows of the wall, willing the foul smelling building to swallow her from sight.<p>

Sitting next to her, Varric lowered his tankard from his mouth and slid his drunken gaze towards her. "S'matter, Hawke?" he asked with the barest hint of a slur.

"Shhh." She hissed back, roughly running her fingers through her dark blonde hair, disheveling the short neat style into something unrecognizably unkempt. "It's Aveline." She nodded to the doorway where the woman in question still stood, garbed in her heavy guard-plate armor and gazing around the tavern with thinly veiled disgust.

Varric blinked and looked around "Are you in some kinda trouble with our local authority inforcer?" he took another large gulp of ale, some of it spilling down to splash mutely on his rich colored shirt. "That's 'hic' _so_ unlike you."

She must have been more drunk than she thought, because she managed to miss the sarcasm in Varric's tone completely.

"It _is_ like me, Varric, I do things to annoy her all the time, she needs to learn to relax," Hawke bit at her lower lip, Aveline was like the bigger sister she had to be to Carver and Bethany for all her life, only that Aveline took everything far too seriously. "anyway, pipe down and lean back or she'll see you, come over, and find me! Then you'll have to find another drinking buddy, 'cause I'll be marooned on a deserted island or worse, I swear!"

Wasted as he was, Varric was not one to miss out on a good story, and this was leading into a hell of a good one.

"What did'ja do?" he leaned back into the shadows with her, swaying slightly, the stale air clinging to his nostrils.

Hawke was watching Aveline carefully as the ginger haired woman stalked further into the bar, green eyes scanning the room with the force of the Maker himself behind them.

"You know that statue down by the docks, the one standing on the Arishok's head?" she nervously fiddled with a chip in her tankard.

"You mean the really pitiful attempt at recreating your image in stone?" Varric answered with a question. "That stupid thing couldn't look more masculine if they had done it in nude."

She nodded. Across the room, Aveline was questioning some of the other drunks.

"Yea, that's the one. Well, the other night, Isabela and I got really drunk, and we thought the same thing about it being male, so we…" she trailed off, and Varric noticed her face had gone blazing red.

She took a huge gulp and blurted. "We took some paint and we, erm, gave the statue some new assets, feminine ones."

Varric almost didn't contain his roar of laughter, but managed and was grateful, because he really needed to hear the end of _this_ story. "Wait, Champion, you're telling me you and your pirate girlfriend vandalized the hero statue? That you painted breasts and other things on it? That's the best damn thing I've ever heard, that's definitely going in my stories." He let out a loud bark of laughter, then stilled as a thought struck him. "Wait, how would Aveline know the two of you did it?"

Hawke shrank back, Aveline had spotted them because of Varric's outburst and the storm heading their way was legendary. She knew so by the dark look across the taller woman's face.

"Well, I'm not completely sure, but I think Isabela signed our names on it after I passed out." She moved to drain the last of her ale, knowing it was likely the last she'd be able to get her hands on for a while.

"Hm," Varric grinned, watching Aveline's hurricane approach with interest. "It was nice knowing, Hawke."

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><p>A.N. Lame Title is lame, it's supposed to be a joke, 'story teller' morphs into 'trouble teller', 'cause Hawke makes trouble and Varric tells about it. Yea, I know, awful.<br>However, this is just a short one-shot I wrote in response to a promt, so it isn't supposed to be gold. I did think it was funny, however, so I uploaded it anyway. Also, this had no beta reader, so if you see any glareing error's please let me know.  
>The prompt for this story was to use these words anywhere and in any order in the story.<br>'Local, Vandal, Maroon, Authority'


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